Politics

Trump Killed Reaganism (And JFK-ism, Too)

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Matt K. Lewis Senior Contributor
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Writing at the Wall Street Journal last week, Bill Galston argued that Trump killed Reaganism. This argument spoke to me, because the subtitle of my new book is How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections.

More specifically, Trump isn’t  killing Reaganism, he’s also returning the GOP to its pre-Reagan image.

This gets messy and complicated, but here’s the theory in a nutshell: Around the time that Reagan became president, the GOP abandoned what we today think of as the Old Right or Paleoconservatism, in favor of a Jack Kennedy-style liberalism. Remember, Kennedy was an anti-Communist and a tax cutter. (Note: Today, we associate liberalism with progressivism, but there’s a reason the term classical liberal is all about freedom and liberty.)

This space was available to Reagan, because the Democratic Party had, post-JFK, abandoned real “liberalism” in favor of radical Leftism.

As luck would have it, F.H. Buckley has just written a very interesting piece over at The American Conservative that makes essentially the same point:

Liberalism did die, but only in the Democratic Party. There it became progressivism, the bastard child of the New Left and identity politics, the perversion of liberalism’s every noble instinct. But liberalism itself did not die. Instead, it was incorporated into the Republican Party, through leaders such as Reagan, and now is almost mainstream conservatism. Like Reagan, today’s conservatives are yesterday’s liberals. What they are not are yesterday’s conservatives.

In Kennedy’s day, Republicans worried more about budget deficits than economic growth and therefore opposed his tax cuts. When the legislation came up for a final vote in the House of Representatives, only 48 Republicans supported it and 126 voted against it, and it passed only because 223 liberal Democrats voted for it.

It’s a very long piece, and you should read the whole thing. But the larger point here is that political parties are not fixed, they evolve to fit the times. For example, once upon a time, the Democratic Party was the party of life; today, it’s the party of abortion. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party was the party of tax cuts, today, it’s the party of tax and spend. Once upon a time, the Democratic Party wanted to “pay any price” and “bear any burden.” And once upon a time, the GOP was the party of protectionism….and it may be again…

The GOP might eventually go the way of the Whigs, but a more likely scenario is that it will first morph (in this case, regress) into something else. And, if and when this happens, we can take solace from the fact that this sort of political reordering is cyclical.

But here’s the rub. When the Democrats abandoned JFK-era “liberalism,” the GOP filled that niche, abandoning the Old Right. But if the GOP abandons “liberalism” in favor of returning to a form of Old Right populism, it’s hard to imagine the Democrats moving to the center. Hillary Clinton might be a hawk, but it’s hard to imagine her governing as some sort of “Scoop” Jackson Democrat. Even if she wanted to, there’s no way her party’s base would permit it.

That leaves a pretty good chunk of us homeless.

This raises some questions. First, in the 21st century, do JFK/Reagan “liberals” constitute a large enough constituency to worry about? (In other words, was Reagan-era “conservatism” a timeless philosophy going back to Edmund Burke—or simply an anomaly that only existed in a post-World War II/Cold War paradigm?)

And secondly, regardless of our size, where do conservatives, err, liberals, like us go now?

Matt K. Lewis